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Most Revision (and indeed, Pouet!) visitors probably follow the Demoscene because they think it separate from other scenes and dig it, because it's about creative computing. In the case of Revision, I think it's still generally regarded as "The" Demoparty because it attracts the most visitors.

There's also the love of strict and limited styles, pixel graphics, lo-fi sound, and programming adventures. This in common with other scenes, like PD, indie games, and artists, musicians, and video producers. They, too, love releasing something that they think will thrill their particular sub-culture. But the Demoscene enforces many limits they don't - we appreciate technical, computery stuff, because we know what's involved and fancy we know what is a great achievement, and I think most of us get a vicarious thrill from seeing it running on our computer!



And Orgas allow this - curiously only in actual Demo compos, in stark contrast to compos that have rules against cheating, such as Graphics and Music compos!

This was sussed out early ;) and once authors found they could fake their way to making a name for themselves in this particular scene, I believe this double discrepancy has harshly suppressed great achievements on platforms not only limited by artificial limits, but also by performance specs - for decades. We may never know what firsts the Demoscene could have seen long ago - from authors simply realizing they will never be appreciated by their own scene, and rightly leaving it behind as a scene that is now like the others.

When asked to write a review of such a fake demo for a Diskmag, I admit I hesitated. I realized that I could convince no-one by resorting to name-calling, and tried my best to put the authors in the best light: as storytellers, releasing something they thought would thrill their particular sub-culture, and made a suggestion to solve this double discrepancy.

I extend this suggestion now to a proposal:

To introduce an Executable Animation Competition: Executables where the scenes intended to thrill the audience, so-called "animation presented as effect", are not generated by the computer, but prepared beforehand as design, vision, and storytelling wishes dictate, for playback on the limited platform of choice. This would be along the lines of Executable Music and Executable Graphics, where platform and limitations are considered but format is not, and authors voluntarily opt-in, as we have seen over the years.

I see this as a way of - in the spirit of Demoscene competition - to compete with peers on performance-limited platforms.

New compos are the way forward, as is phasing out obsolete compos.
I can only guess what kind of demos you are referring to, but you cannot and should not try to enforce that a demo must not play some sort of animation from time to time. What can be done, however, is to call fake demos fakes. Parties can take better care to impose proper rules and to enforce them more strictly. Support parties that do that.

Animation presented as animation is fine. :) Problem is no party I know of does what you say, so I can't support one. And if one did, it might be an arbitrary decision - granted, it could be released at the next party without rules.

No, I still feel a solution where authors want to compete with peers and express themselves freely is the way forward, as opposed to disqualifying releases that clearly thrill Demosceners.

I see what you are doing. ;]

I think that you should try to promote the proposal that every demo should be interactive somehow (to minimize "fake" effects) instead of start again the old debate about what a demo is or should be.

It's very difficult to trace the line about what is enough animation/precalcing/graphics/whatever.

And yet, if we do it (interactive demos) people will complain about the abuse of game engines like Unity. :D

Unity doesn't run on performance-limited platforms, which is all this proposal speaks of. (But that is not to say that on any platform, an animation presented as effect would be faster than the effect, and not require coding the effect so that it is generated by the computer on which the demo runs, just as for performance-limited platforms.)

What this proposal offers is precisely that there is no need for anyone to draw the line, just as no-one draws the line for Executable Graphics and Executable Music. Those competitions are there, ready for competitors to target and plan for, and to try to win over their peers.

Men lägg av!

So if I read between the lines correctly - people don't do enough "demo demos" for your taste? Enough cycle counting, glenz and all that? There's a simple solution to this - you can make as many "demo demos" as you want, enjoy them and even enter them at parties. If they're good, you can start a revolution, and in any case we can all enjoy them for what they are.

But it's so much easier to just go on about how other people's demos are fake, than to make an effort and actually create something worth watching...

yes revision, please do make sure to find some time in your undoubtedly empty schedule to facilitate "photon's big ol' opt-in leprosarium compo for lame cheaters" so that the venerable photon himself can finally claim his righteous victory in the "real realtime compo that's only for real coders like photon who never, ever, ever cheat or release lame crap (like a fkn samplepack in a democompo LOL)". oh and please don't forget to emphasize terms that you had to google before you dared putting them in your tl;dr midnight rant because that makes you look really, really smart in the minds of the average retard in the audience that never was smart enough to understand that their sole raison d'être was to vote your boooring effect slideshows to the crushing victories that they so glaringly obviously deserve (except that samplepack maybe LOL)

lol

also, paper voting only.

i feel like theres a severe lack of scrollers in newschool productions, too.

Such a fresh idea, can't believe I'm reading it on a website in 2020 instead of a diskmag right after State of the Art won a compo and "real coders" experienced major butthurt.

And the fun times when 'State of Mind' was released

I may be out of touch here, but why the harsh replies?

A pragmatic solution could be to limit the size of demos to the size of one disk, so that anim demos won't run for that long at least.

But how do we limit "LE TRUE REALTIME"-demos from going on for ages and ages?

Le realtime could go on longer for my taste, but it's usually also limited to 10 minutes or so. ;) Limits are good.

Which is usually 7 minutes too much anyway.

This is not the first time the thread starter expresses his very specific opinions about what demos should & shouldn't be.



While that would work for a pure A500 demo compo, it doesn't really work out for compos where different systems compete, such as the mixed high-end / low-end Amiga demo compo at Revision (which I suspect was the background for this thread). I.e. limiting demos for 060 machines with tons of memory to a single DD floppy would probably prevent a lot of people from entering, and stating that "the size limit is only for A500 entries to this compo" seems weird and unfair.

State Of The Art came out literally ~27 years ago. Why this discussion NOW?

Also let's conveniently forget that what you so easily dismiss as "animation players" is in 99% of cases way more complicated, well planned and optimized code than your copperbars and poly fillers, shall we.

You may be a bit out of touch here ;)

Nah, I too prided myself on being among the global elite that knows which bit in which video chip register to flip at what exact cycle. And then I kinda grew up, and learned that shit for real.

So now you're not flipping video chip registers anymore? :)

I let the computer do it! People accuse me of cheating now though :(